Tag: Facebook

Facebook recently launched a web wide Like button which allows everyone to add Like buttons on every page of their site. With in hours of launching everyone started adding buttons on their site. The bloggers who use WordPress platform for blogging didn’t stay behind in the race, they also started adding the button on their blog and very soon the button started appearing on thousands of blogs.

Let me tell you how can you add the Facebook Like button on you WordPress Blog with in 5 minutes, without any extra plugin.

Goto the your WordPress theme directory and open the file single.php and add the following code snippet to appropriate position in your file.

Have you ever wondered how Mashable and other high volume blogs keep up with their fan pages? How they can post every blog post on their Fan Page as soon as it is published? If you have Facebook Fan Page for your blog but you publish your blog posts manually on your Fan Page then this post is for you.

If you haven’t yet created your Facebook Fan Page, kindly create one and then continue reading.

To add your blog to your Facebook Fan page, follow the steps below:

1. Goto your page.

2. If the notes tab is not displayed, goto Notes tab by clicking on the “+” sign.

3. Click on ‘Write a New Note’

5. When you are on Notes writing page, click on the notes settings icon.

6. Click on the “Import a blog” on Notes settings page.

7. Paste your blog URL in RSS/Feed box

8. Click on “Start Importing”

Thats it. You are done. Now whenever you publish a new blog post on your blog, it will be published to your Facebook Fan Page. Go and start blogging and your Facebook Fans will get updated.

We all love new features, specially the features that makes using the service more easier. Facebook has always care about their users and it is that care that they have deployed a new feature few days ago. You can now reply to comments via email. Suppose you are on the road and away from computer and you got an email notifying that someone has made a comment. It doesn’t matter if they have commented on status update, on a link or a photo or video you uploaded. You can reply to every type of comments via email. Lets see how its done.

I wrote “Happy Birthday!!” on one of my friends wall.

He commented on the wall post thanking me and I got the email notifying that my friend has commented on the wall post.

Now you don’t have to do much, just hit the reply button of your email client and compose your reply.

Hit send and you are done.

This is a really great feature from Facebook. It will make replying to comments a lot easier. What you think about this new feature? Will it make replying to comments easier for you?

Though I am a fan of Google services but the way it is moving towards establishing its monopoly on the Internet gives me shivers. Many of you might already know about twitterfeed, it is a service that posts your blog updates or feed updates to twitter, not only to Twitter but few more services which includes Facebook too. As of writing this post twitterfeed claims to be feeding 712988 feeds to other services. But that number will decrease sooner or later as Google has released a new feature for their Feedburner service known as Socialize. According to Google,

Connect your feed to the real-time social web! With Socialize, FeedBurner will automatically post updates from your feed to your social media account.

Configuration Limitations

The socialize feature comes with many limitations. It does not allow me to configure the post frequency. It does not allow me use my favorite URL shortner, yes you guessed it, you have to use the Google’s URL shortner goo.gl. It does not allow me add text to the begining and end at the same time.

Have a look at twitterfeed’s configuration options in the screenshot below, you can clearly see the number of URL shortners twitterfeed allows you to use. I can use separate URL shortners for separate feeds, this is awesome:

Have a look at Feedburner’s configuration options in the screenshot below:

Posting Limitations

Feedburner can only post to Twitter but twitterfeed can post to other services too which includes Laconica, Hellotxt, Ping.fm and Facebook.

Users will use whatever they feel comfortable with, there are other services too which post your updates to Twitter which includes FriendFeed too, I myself use FriendFeed. I only wrote this twitterfeed and Feedburner socialize comparison because I read a post from Amit Agarwal who is very senior blogger about switching from twitterfeed to Google, so I decided to write comparing both the services. Now its up to you to decide what service will you use? If you have never used twitterfeed then you may start using Google’s Socialize feature of Feedburner and if you have been using twitterfeed you may want to stay with it.

What service do you use to publish your blog posts to twitter? Do you find it useful to automate the process of publishing blog posts to twitter? Best of luck publishing your blog posts to twitter, no matter what service you use keep posting good stuff to twitter because this is what makes it useful.

P.S: If I am not following you on twitter yet let me know your twitter username in the comments and I will surely follow you.

As we all know that few days ago twitter has introduced new RT feature, and Twitter team specially @ev seems to like the new feature. But do the community like it? Is RT really created by twitter? I as a twitter user do not like the new RT feature. I have my own reasons like other people but I would like to discuss the reason for which any sensible person won’t like twitter.

Like is not ReTweet

RT stands for ReTweet which means tweeting a tweet again because you find it useful and you want to share it with your followers. Now the way new RT feature of twitter works totally negates the definition of RT. Because with new RT feature the tweet is never ReTweeted, it just gets listed in the timeline of a user. The only thing that happens is bunch of meta data gets attached to the tweet. In simple words the new RT feature of twitter works exactly same as “Like” button in Facebook.

Tweet is lost

It looks like Twitter assumes that we watch our twitter timeline whole day even when we are sleeping, but this is not true. When I am sleeping or away from twitter I miss a lot of tweets, though I try to scroll back and read many of them but I don’t always read all of them. This means that I can and will miss some important tweets even if they are RTd by all of the people I follow, because the ReTweeted tweet just do not pop up in the timeline. It stays at its current position and the new meta information is attached. For example if one of your friend Retweeted a tweet while you were sleeping. then after that ReTweet there were like 100 or so tweets in your timeline, you woke up in the morning and started using twitter. You missed that ReTweet because you didn’t scrolled down, now one of your friend gets on twitter and ReTweeted the tweet that was ReTweeted while you were away or sleeping. That ReTweet will not popup in your timeline even your another friend just ReTweeted it, so the ReTweets have lost the value.

Community Response

I have seen many people using the new RT feature and many have stopped using it like me because I think the feature that was introduced by Twitter is not really a ReTweet but Like. I am staying with the old ReTweet and hope that many others will follow as the new ReTweet just don’t work the way it should. If the ReTweeted Tweets start poping to the top then the new ReTweet feature might be somewhat usable but until then the new feature is just not for me. I won’t be ReTweeting anything that will be ReTweeted in my timeline using new ReTweet feature, sorry guys.

I hope Twitter will listen to its users because they are users who have build the twitter and specially the ReTweet was invented by the community not by twitter. I have seen many people switching to alternatives, maybe I will follow the steps too but not in the near future. I hope Twitter team will understand the importance of users feedback and will listen to us and at least I will not have to look for the alternatives.

Its been almost a month since I last posted on my blog. First of all I should sorry all of you out there for not being able to updated the blog specially I want to sorry to those who were expecting me to post more posts specially about wordpress. I had been quite busy with some stuff and hence couldn’t update the blog, and I am really sorry for that. I hope I will be able to keep with the pace of changing technology and post useful stuff as soon as I have any.

If you ask any blogger they will say a blog should be updated once a week except if you are posting about something that does not gets updated that frequently. But my blog was about Programming, WordPress, blogging, Twitter and Facebook which is for sure has changed a lot since I last posted. I have missed a lot of things and wasn’t able to keep myself updated with the latest stuff happening special in the social media scene.

Today when I logged on to Facebook I found out that highlights are gone, now they show up in the news feed. Facebook now have a news feed as well as Live feed, I am still not able to figure out difference between the two. But my understanding is the Live Feed thing shows that FriendFeed team is doing their work and Live feed should have real time feed coming. This is surely some great stuff coming out of Facebook and I will write more about new features and updates from Facebook very soon. I am thinking of writing posts on how to use these new features to enhance your Facebooking and use it effectively. Oh by they way, I also like that new ability of Draging and Dropping of news filters.

Twitter seems to have new features too, specially the list feature which is as per my knowledge currently only available to 5% of users. But the list feature will be available to all users from sometime next month. I hope they provide a sensible way of managing and using lists through their web interface. Also I notice Twitter is going pretty hard on spammers because they get them suspended very soon after they register. I got follow notifications from few spammers and as I manually check everyone who follows me and then follow them back if they are human and share useful stuff not just what they had in lunch. Sharing what one had in lunch is also interesting but only if that person shares other useful stuff too.

Stay tuned for more posts coming this week. I will try to do a post daily but only if I will have some useful stuff to write about.

P.S WordPress has been updated too, it is now 2.8.5. I don’t know when the update was released but I just saw the notification at the top, so gotta update too.